WATCH WHERE YOU WALK

ENJOY THE SHOW

Blossom is queen right now and paying attention for the short time it’s on display is the least you can do. Fruit trees devote a huge amount of their energy to advertising their readiness to produce through their spectacular arrays of blossom and the bees respond accordingly. So, I believe, should we. The Japanese hold festivals to pay homage to the blossoming of the cherries, as do we New Zealanders (at least those who live in Alexandra and Hastings), and there’re few celebrations more heartwarming than a blossom festival. In the home garden or orchard – and many home gardens these days are part-vege garden, part orchard – growers are taking time to appreciate and enjoy the show provided by their fruiting trees: plum, apple, peach and apricot. Blossom doesn’t last forever. In fact, one decent gale and it’s gone, so if your trees are alight with bloom, get outside and among it. Picnics are recommended and Soggy conditions in parts of the country (the wet parts) are causing problems with accessing gardens. Those boggy impediments range from having gumboots so weighed down with clinging mud that they can barely be lifted, to garden beds having to be renamed as small lakes. Whatever the degree of innundation your garden may have suffered, it’s widely accepted that you shouldn’t walk on the soil, for fear of driving all of the oxygen out of it and rendering it unfit for planting. Make paths and walkways through your swamps – use stepping stones or rounds of tree-trunk. Better still, stay off the ground till it’s tillable.

PROTECT EVERYTHING FROM EVERYTHING

The spring garden is a vulnerable one and spring is a tempestuous season, meaning everything is